High Society Page 5

  It’s interesting to ask why Grace so desperately wanted to play Bertha in this gloomy, haunted play. The obvious answer is that it was a serious classic with two experienced major players in the cast. But she may also have been attracted to the play’s theme, which she knew from her own life: a daughter’s struggle for independence from a severe and possessive family.

  THE FATHER. I believe that it is for your future good that you should leave home, go to town and learn something useful. Will you?

  THE DAUGHTER. Oh yes—I should love to go to town, away from here, anywhere. If I can only see you sometimes …

  THE FATHER. But if Mother doesn’t want you to go?

  THE DAUGHTER. But she must let me.

  THE FATHER. But if she won’t?

  THE DAUGHTER. Well, then, I don’t know what will happen. But she must—she must! You must ask her very nicely—she wouldn’t pay any attention to my asking.

  The play insists that true parenthood does not consist in shaping a child according to one’s will, but in providing the freedom to learn and grow according to her own lights. “I want to be myself!” cries Bertha—a line to which Grace could relate, and which she apparently spoke with great poignancy. In the case of the Kellys, the parents’ opinions were the reverse of the characters in the play: Jack had not wanted his daughter “to go to town,” and Grace had been able to do so only because Margaret predicted that, after a trial run, their daughter would soon be home. Like Bertha, Grace needed from her parents the freedom to be herself and to determine her own path in life—an autonomy that Grace later struggled to give her own children. In other words, Strindberg’s central motif struck close to her heart, and she was far too sensitive and perceptive not to have noticed that the play’s family was a virtual mirror image of her own. As Judith Quine recalled, “Grace’s father wanted her to be re-created in his image.”

  This parallel may explain her reticence to discuss the play, her role in it, and the auspicious New York theatrical debut that effectively jump-started her career. With a dismissive smile, she referred only to the matter of her height: if the leading players had not been so tall, “I wouldn’t have been in the cast.”

  HER GOOD reviews earned Grace the attention of New York’s increasing number of television producers. Like advertising and modeling agencies, they were being asked to provide more “product” for live TV and its startling increase in the number of comedy and quiz shows, news commentaries, children’s programs and live dramas.

  In early 1950, many highly successful (and eventually long-running) shows in various genres were already in place. The Howdy Doody Show and Kukla, Fran and Ollie were both ostensibly for children, but much of the humor was spontaneous, unrehearsed and appreciated only by their parents. Milton Berle’s variety show reflected his vaudeville background. Arthur Godfrey was a ukulele-strumming humorist who successfully cultivated an image of bumptious friendliness—until he began to fire his cast on live TV. Baseball games dominated the sports season.

  Perhaps most memorable, however, were the many live TV dramas, all of them sponsored by companies that majestically exploited their names—among them Westinghouse Studio One, The Kraft Television Theatre, The Lux Video Theatre, The Armstrong Circle Theatre, The Goodyear Television Playhouse and The Philco Television Playhouse. Every night, viewers had a choice of several half-hour and hour-long live programs for grownups, many of them written and directed by people with theatrical and radio experience, and many who later went on to successful careers in Hollywood. As for the actors, there were old hands (Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan) and new (James Dean, Eva Marie Saint, Paul Newman, Walter Matthau, Rod Steiger, Steve McQueen). Theatrical producers and talent agents regularly attended Broadway plays, hoping to sign up good new talent before a movie offer came in, as the major studios—already engaged in a bitter struggle with TV for audience dominance—would not allow contract players to appear on the home screen.

  A theatrical agent named Edith Van Cleve, who had been Marlon Brando’s agent, was on the lookout for new talent to represent. (After his long run in A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando went to Hollywood in late 1949 and never again worked in the theatre.) Grace, who did not have an agent, was performing in The Father when Edith saw her onstage and offered to represent her.3* Grace was receiving offers for future employment almost daily in early 1950, and she realized she needed a good representative; Edith, a well-born former actress, suited her needs and personality.

  “I had just done a screen test,” Grace recalled, “and then I had a call to go to a barnlike studio somewhere on the far West Side of Manhattan, where I did another test, with Robert Alda, for a picture called Taxi. I was eager to do it because it was going to be filmed in New York, not Hollywood, and it was a one-picture deal. At that point in my career, I tried to avoid signing a long-term contract with a studio. Also, it was an interesting part—that of an Irish girl who has come to New York with her baby and goes around in a cab trying to find her husband. I wanted to try an Irish accent, and I found the character very sympathetic. I didn’t get the job, but the test survived for a few years and helped me later on.”

  Taxi’s director, Gregory Ratoff, heartily endorsed Grace for the role of Mary Turner, but after seeing the test, the executives at Twentieth Century-Fox in Hollywood decided she was too elegant and sophisticated for the role of a simple country lass; the job went to Constance Smith, an experienced Irish actress who had already appeared in a dozen pictures. “I was in the ‘too’ category for a very long time,” Grace recalled. “I was too tall, too leggy, too chinny. I remember that Mr. Ratoff kept yelling, ‘She’s perfect! What I love about this girl is that she’s not pretty!’”

  Edith was soon on the phone, however, and she arranged for Grace to audition for a supporting role in director Joshua Logan’s production of The Wisteria Trees, starring Helen Hayes. Rehearsals were scheduled for February and the opening night for late March. But Grace lost the role because Hayes, who had cast approval, judged that she could not project her voice and was therefore unsuited to stage acting. There had been no vocal problems at the 1,102-seat Cort Theatre during the run of The Father, but when she was asked to reach the 1,437 seats of the Martin Beck Theatre from its empty stage at the audition for The Wisteria Trees, she may indeed have sounded strained—or merely inaudible. “She quickly brushed aside such setbacks,” according to her longtime friend Gant Gaither, “and refused to waste any time wallowing in self-pity.” Instead, Grace considered what her next opportunity might be.

  She did not have to wait long—indeed, from 1950 to 1954, she acted in three dozen live TV dramas, which made her one of the busiest actresses working in the medium who was not cast in a weekly series.4*

  She began the busy year of TV work during the run of The Father, when she rehearsed for a week during the mornings and then appeared live on the evening of Sunday, January 8, on the Philco Television Playhouse, in the title role of “Bethel Merriday,” based on the 1940 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The teleplay by William Kendall Clarke moved the story quickly from fifteen-year-old Bethel as a student in 1931, through her college years, in which she discovers her love for the stage. She then embarks on a tour as a professional actress, and we follow her transformation from a star-struck girl into a seasoned trouper. The role seemed made for Grace.

  “Despite the quickness of the preparation and the broadcast, she really studied and applied herself to understanding the character,” recalled the episode’s director, Delbert Mann. “In fact, she did brilliantly, and immediately joined the kind of unofficial TV stock company we had in those days, made up of the actors we cast over and over again because they were reliable professionals.”

  Fred Coe, who produced many of Grace’s TV projects, added that Grace “had talent and attractiveness, but so do a lot of other young people in the theatre who never become stars. The thing that made her stand out was something we call ‘style.’ She wasn’t just another beautiful girl, she was the essence of freshness—t
he kind of girl every man dreams of marrying. All of us who worked with her just loved her. You couldn’t work with Grace Kelly without falling a little in love with her.” That sentiment was often repeated. “Everyone in the production company of Rear Window and To Catch a Thief fell for her,” recalled Alfred Hitchcock’s associate producer, Herbert Coleman, a few years later. “Not only Hitch, most of all. Just about everyone wanted to bring her a cup of tea or run an errand for her or do something. She never asked, much less did she demand anything, but everyone wanted to show how much they loved and admired her. I think sometimes it made her uncomfortable.”

  “Off-camera, she reminded me of a small-town high school teacher,” recalled Rita Gam. “Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her face was scrubbed clean except for a little dash of lipstick, and she wore glasses. She seemed very likable to me—and very shy. But as we became friends, I saw that along with her determination to succeed as an actress, she had a certain inner calm. She accepted the world as it really was, not what she wanted it to be. I remember thinking that this was something unique in someone so young.”

  During the last week of The Father, Grace rehearsed with director Franklin Schaffner on the production of “The Rockingham Tea Set,” based on a story by Virginia Douglas Dawson; it was broadcast live (as were all her performances) on Monday evening, January 23, and it is the earliest extant example we have of a performance by Grace Kelly.

  In this hour-long drama (“introducing Grace Kelly as Miss Mappin”), Grace plays the nurse-companion to an elderly lady. Miss Mappin is suspected of killing her previous patient—a bitter woman who faked paralysis in order to keep her husband housebound (in which of course she failed). Grace has a long introductory speech leading to the story as a flashback, and to see it almost sixty years later is to be deeply impressed by her unmannered delivery and unaffected diction. She subsequently appeared in ten more TV dramas during 1950.5*

  Things were happening quickly. On May 22, she was one of a dozen actors named by Theatre World magazine as a “most promising personality of the Broadway stage for 1950.” Others honored that evening during ceremonies at the Algonquin Hotel included Charlton Heston and his wife, Lydia Clarke.

  That spring of 1950, Grace’s busy TV schedule effectively (and to her enormous relief) ended her modeling career. Edith Van Cleve continued to send her out to theatrical auditions, but in June a momentous development suspended those appointments, too.

  Sol C. Siegel, a powerhouse producer at Twentieth Century-Fox, had seen Grace in The Father and contacted director Henry Hathaway, who was in New York that spring, preparing a picture called Fourteen Hours. After a brief reading and wardrobe and makeup tests, Grace was offered a very small role. She accepted, simply for the chance to see a movie made in a Hollywood studio. “I had my heart set on a career in the theatre, but I accepted because it meant only two days of work—I would be back in New York before the end of the summer. I really thought this would be a one-shot experience.” She agreed to the offer of a $500 fee, and on June 15 the New York Times noted that Grace had joined the cast of Fourteen Hours.

  DURING THE MORNING of July 26, 1938, a young man named John William Warde opened a window on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Gotham in New York City and climbed onto the ledge, threatening suicide. His sister, a few friends, two doctors and the police tried to persuade him to come back into the room. Firemen stretched a cargo net across a lower wall to break his fall, but the ropes became hopelessly tangled during their effort. Late that evening, as thousands watched in horror and news cameras rolled, Warde leaped to his death after an eleven-hour ordeal.

  Hollywood knew a good story when it happened in real life, however morbid and however much of it would have to be changed to preserve the family’s privacy. A 1949 New Yorker account of the incident was called “The Man on the Ledge,” but Fox changed that and expanded the time to Fourteen Hours. In addition, no studio at that time could release a picture concluding with a suicide—hence in John Paxton’s screenplay, the young man is finally saved by a net and brought to safety (and the ministrations of a psychiatrist). With edgy sensitivity, Richard Basehart played the leading role as someone unhappy in all his personal relations and without hope for any success in life; his costar is Paul Douglas, as a patrolman trying to save the man’s life.

  When Fox sent Grace her work schedule for August, she was at the family home in Philadelphia. Her mother (in Lizanne’s words) “foresaw God knows what dangers in that city full of movie people, and suggested, ‘The presence of your sister would be very well received by the family.’” The Queen of England could not have adopted more formal diction than that, and at once the sisters obeyed the maternal fiat. Peggy was negotiating the shoals of a difficult marriage and motherhood, and so seventeen-year-old Lizanne went to Hollywood as Grace’s unlikely chaperone.

  Thanks to Edith Van Cleve and her colleagues, the Kelly sisters were installed in an expensive suite (courtesy of the studio) at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Next day, they arrived at the gates of Twentieth Century-Fox on Pico Boulevard. Grace was whisked off to a makeup caravan and then to wardrobe, where she put on her costume: an expensive dress, gloves, a white hat with veil and a capacious fur coat. Her character was obviously a woman of means, and Grace was meant to be noticed in a crowd scene.

  She was then escorted by an assistant director to the “New York street” on the Fox back lot, where Hathaway was ready to direct her first appearance—in a taxicab caught in a traffic jam caused by the drama of the man on the ledge. The cameras rolled, and Grace lowered the taxi’s windows to tell the policeman (Douglas) that she was on her way “to an important appointment—and I’m late now.” He advises her to leave the cab and walk, which she does. Hathaway called, “Cut it!” as the several angles were completed. Grace Kelly’s first scene in a Hollywood movie lasted precisely thirty-one seconds in the final version. A studio driver then returned her and Lizanne to the hotel, where they called home to report on the day’s excitement. Their father was unimpressed: “Those movie people can be pretty shallow,” he muttered, as if he knew this from experience.

  Grace’s second and final scene was filmed the following day, on the set of a lawyer’s office. Listening to attorneys read the complicated terms of her divorce and the formalities regarding custody of her children, she speaks only one word: “Yes.” Then the actor cast as her husband (played by James Warren) was brought to the set, and we learn her character’s full name—Louise Anne Fuller. She has been watching the drama of the man on the ledge from the attorney’s window, and now she seems to have second thoughts about a divorce. “If you’d been on time here today,” Louise says to her husband, “it would have been all right. I wanted to do it [i.e., go through with the divorce], but I got tired of waiting—and thinking.” It’s clear that the couple will attempt a reconciliation; the scene closes with Louise in her husband’s embrace as she gazes out once more at the young man on the ledge. The point of the scene was meant to be ambiguous: Does she feel as confused and hopeless as he—or does she suddenly realize how important her own life and relationships are—or both?

  The sequence required only three takes—each time because Hathaway asked Grace to bring her voice down to a lower register. The office sequence was timed at one minute and forty-three seconds, and with that, Grace’s two days of work were complete. Given tenth billing in the released film, she appears in her movie debut for a total of two minutes and fourteen seconds.

  Siegel, Hathaway and Fox had no further roles for Grace, and when the picture was released in March 1951, producers and agents did not race to their telephones to call her agent with offers. Decades later, it’s clear that this small role could have been as well performed by any one of a score of available young actresses. Nevertheless, this is a polished and complete little performance, precisely because of her understanding of the role and the allusive structure of her lines.

  Fourteen Hours was mostly ignored for a half-century,
until Fox decided to rerelease it as a so-called film noir. Although most of the action occurs at night, it’s certainly not in that vague genre. There are no crimes or violence, and no bad girls, but it is an effective ninety-two-minute suspense drama, marred only by the facile psychology then in common currency. Grace, who tried to learn everything she could during those two days, was an adaptable, willing and pliant collaborator as well as extraordinarily photogenic. As Cary Grant memorably said, “In two senses, she didn’t have a bad side—you could film her from any angle, and she was one of the most untemperamental, cooperative people in the business.”

  There was one unforeseen consequence of Grace’s movie debut. An Oregon teenager named Gene Gilbert saw Fourteen Hours and founded a Grace Kelly Fan Club that within a year had spread like the proverbial wildfire across the country. Gene kept Grace informed of new local chapters and members, and Grace responded politely. Privately, she thought this was terrifically amusing, as if she had entered a political race. After she had opened the letters from Oregon, she would announce to friends, “We’ve got a new girl in Washington [or wherever]. I think she’s ours!”

  Back in New York, Grace moved into the newly completed Manhattan House, a nineteen-story luxury rental apartment building with 581 units, at 200 East 66th Street, which occupied the entire block between Second and Third Avenues and 65th and 66th Streets—a former site for storing hansom carriages and the electric streetcars of the Third Avenue Railway System. The opening of Manhattan House to tenants in 1950 and 1951 marked the start of a new architectural style in postwar New York, its light-gray brick façade a severe contrast to the prevailing art deco designs of earlier decades.